


He Might Like That

by Sasskarian



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Denial of Feelings, F/M, Fighting Kink, Mutual Pining, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:27:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23202457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sasskarian/pseuds/Sasskarian
Summary: He tunes back into the not-so-friendly argument in time to hear Greef splutter. “You trash talked whileholding hands!If that’s not flirting, I’m a kowakian monkey lizard.”“It was arm wrestling, not holding hands,” Din points out mildly.
Relationships: Cara Dune & Greef Karga, Cara Dune & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV), Cara Dune/The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 132





	He Might Like That

**Author's Note:**

> This silly one little AU takes place sometime after Gideon is dealt with, Din and the baby are safe, and it's mostly general fluff and amusement.

**| Nevarro |**

“So. Let me get this straight.” Greef lifts his bad knee with a groan, settling it over his other leg so he can sprawl a little more indolently. Din’s HUD focuses in, shows the elevated temperature in the joint in a dark red, and he turns it off with a flicker of his eye. Greef lifts his glass again, takes a sip, and gestures with it before continuing. “You two. Not together?”

Greef isn’t precisely a friend, but they’d been shot at by Moffs and droids and troopers all the same, which, in Din’s line of work, made for something close enough to friends for a drink now and again.

Besides. Greef had never shorted him on a bounty or passed up choice ones for sordid favors, and aside from trying to kill him that one time, had never really treated him all that badly. And what mando didn’t have an ally turn on him now and again? That hadn’t been personal; _just business_ is a phrase that gets a lot of legwork on The Way.

“Definitely _not together,_ ” Cara hisses, slamming her own tankard down and sloshing the oily-looking ale over her white-knuckled hands.

Under the _beskar,_ Din’s neck warms. While true, she didn’t have to sound _quite_ that offended by the notion, did she?

A new notice pops on the HUD: the kid—he never had settled on a name for him, had he?—gurgles sleepily, pulling the thin blanket over his head with a vague hand-wave. Ever since the little womp-rat had tried stealing the Crest for the second time, Din counts the pricey motion sensor security system as one of his best purchases to date, and it lets him keep an eye on his kid while he’s out.

He tunes back into the not-so-friendly argument in time to hear Greef splutter. “You trash talked while _holding hands_! If that’s not flirting, I’m a kowakian monkey lizard.”

“It was arm wrestling, not holding hands,” Din points out mildly. His own drink sits in front of him, untouched since sitting down; neither of his companions seems to find the mostly-symbolic tank odd in the slightest.

“And there was nothing flirty about it!” Cara says, and she is some shade of magnificent, with her eyes flashing dark brown fire and a flush riding high on her cheeks. She looks about one more teasing jab away from throwing a fist in Greef’s face and for one amused moment, Din entertains himself with how that fight would play out:

Cara has the speed and raw strength to take Greef to the floor, and with her economical, no-punches-pulled style, she’d have him begging for air or death inside of forty-two seconds. If that. She doesn’t so much fight as simply _brawl_ her way through whatever obstacle dares set foot in her path, and damn if it isn’t some sort of fascinating. There’s a joy in Cara Dune when she fights that calls to the _manda_ inside him, a flash and sizzle that tells him if Cara put her mind to it, she’d make a hell of a mandalorian.

He might kind of like that, if she’d ever stop running long enough to actually look at him.

But she hasn’t, and probably won’t, and Din isn’t exactly in the habit of making himself so vulnerable to every strong, capable fighter that stumbles across him. He definitely has never pined in his entire life, and isn’t about to start now. Even if Carasynthia Dune is as _mandokarla_ as beings come.

“Sure,” Greef says. He salutes Cara with his glass. “I’ll believe that when you _aren’t_ helping him raise a kid and getting all chummy with the mandos.”

The sound that comes out of Cara’s mouth is about fifty percent outrage and fifty percent embarrassed horror, and completely entertaining. Din laughs to himself as Cara doesn’t, as he’d thought, launch herself over the table but aims a vicious kick at Greef’s chair that sends him skittering backwards on two legs. Even after he falls to the ground with a painful thud, Greef shoots her a smirk and says something about going native that has Cara hauling him up by his jacket to snarl in his face.

***

“Little shit still sleeping?”

Din doesn’t jump when Cara looms out of the shadows, blending into the moonless Nevarran night; his HUD has 360 degree motion detection, and he’s usually got an eye on her anyway.

“Growing fast,” he replies softly, one nerve-simulated gloved fingertip stroking along the little one’s ear. “And eating everything in sight.”

“So I see.” Cara arches a brow at the small, furious imprints of baby teeth on the metal crib. For all her _I don’t do babies_ talk right before things went to shit with Gideon, the strong lines of her face soften when the kid turns over and snuggles into a baby-sized pillow. “Maybe you should try some flash-frozen meat to keep him from gnawing on your ship. One’s gotta be cheaper than the other.”

Din points behind him at a chest that easily reaches his waist: _Fresh Naboo Jella Gorgs; flash frozen for that perfect crunch!_

“Huh. Don’t you just think of everything.” She reaches down, brushing a knuckle across the kid’s cheek, and a knot of tension Din refused to pay attention to in the depths of his stomach loosens. Most people wouldn’t forgive someone for choke-holding them, especially when she was almost two full meters and the kid was maybe a fifth of her size. But there was nothing but baffled affection in her face and Din settles his newest purchase—a small, raggedy stuffed doll with armor loosely, and inaccurately, based on mando designs—in the corner of the crib before nodding to the galley.

They’ve done this half a dozen times or more since Gideon and IG-11. Whiling away long hours while the Crest diagnostics run, while Din cleans his guns and Cara sharpens a knife with a wicked curve. While they wait, even still, for the other shoe to drop, for Stormtroopers to rush the ship or Gideon to rise from his grave yet again.

Din doesn’t look at the angled lightsaber hilt tucked in the bottom of his weapons cache, and Cara knows better than to ask about it, when she stops pretending to not see it. Until he decides what to do with the Darksaber, it’s just going to sit there and be patient.

The silence that falls between them in these slow, lazy hours is usually companionable, sometimes holy, and only broken by the sounds of bodies in chairs and a sleeping baby. Tonight, though, there’s a wire of tension strung between them, plucked taut with every overly-aware breath and movement. He wonders, idly, who’s going to break it first.


End file.
